Good Enough to Call Your Own

Titles Borrowed From Shakespeare

The better part of this section has been devoted to
Shakespeare’s influence on our everyday speech. Now we turn to more
self-conscious attempts to be catchy or literary or profound or
commercial—sometimes all at once. Authors of all kinds have, like
everyone else, turned to the Bard in a pinch; but sometimes they
end up quoting him just because his language has so thoroughly
permeated both written and spoken English that we almost
breathe Shakespeare.

It’s quite natural for catchy phrases to turn themselves into
titles somewhere along the line—Shakespeare himself capitalized on
few, including “all’s well that ends well” and “much ado about
nothing.” The literary wheel has come full circle (King
Lear) as Shakespeare’s works have gradually become a vast
public domain of catch phrases and poetic profundities. Indeed, why
cudgel thy brains (Hamlet) when a time-tested title is ready
to hand? From headlines to best-sellers to corporate reports, no
written matter seems safe from a Shakespearean reference,
intentional or otherwise.

I had originally hoped to provide a list of all the book titles
pilfered from the Bard. As it turns out, only a madman would try to
exhaustively catalogue such a list; this madman gave up after about
five hundred of them. A true embarrassment of riches; if I needed
any convincing not to call this book Dressing Old Worlds New
(“Sonnet 76”) or Caviar to the General
(Hamlet), that did it. So I borrowed from Cole Porter
instead, whose song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” is the showstopper
of the 1948 musical Kiss Me Kate. (But there’s no escape:
the title of the musical is itself a quotation from the play it
adapts: The Taming of the Shrew.)

O, How the Bard Becomes It

Borrowing leads to more borrowings. Referring to the Bard is
like eating potato chips: once you start, it’s hard to stop. In
this regard, Aldous Huxley ranks as one of the biggest gluttons; he
dipped his hand into Shakespeare’s bag at least seven times. Huxley
could compass both the most patent of thefts (like 1922’s Mortal
Coils, from Hamlet) and the most furtive (like 1944’s
Time Must Have a Stop, from Henry the Fourth, Part
1).

Of course, Shakespeare loses nothing by it—in fact, he profits.
Miranda’s naïve exclamation “O brave new world!” (The
Tempest) didn’t often leap off anyone’s tongue until Huxley
transformed it into the standard epithet for technological dystopia
with his 1932 novel Brave New World. The success of this
grim volume prompted the already all-too-willing Huxley to
appropriate the line once again—for Brave New World
Revisited (1958) —but by then he’d made the phrase his own.

Yet once a second generation of borrowers moved in on Huxley’s
territory, even the moderate initiative involved in appropriating
“brave new world” straight out of The Tempest dissipated
into reflex, if not into parody. Witness Robert Cooke’s relatively
early rerun, Improving on Nature: The Brave New World of Genetic
Engineering (1977) and Grant Fjermedal’s more recent, and more
hair-raising, The Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living
Brain Machines (1986). Although these latter-day Cassandras
probably had Huxley’s books foremost in mind, we brushed-up readers
are prepared to remit a royalty to the Swan of Avon.

Of course, most authors who have swiped a few telling words from
the Bard had already brushed up their Shakespeare thoroughly and
wanted their readers to know it. D. H. Lawrence, for example,
resorts to one of the most obvious of scenes for the short-story
title “This Mortal Coil” (from Hamlet). Ingmar Bergman
likewise goes where the action is— Julius Caesar —to title
his film about a trapeze artist The Serpent’s Egg (1977).
Anyone who would call a book O How the Wheel Becomes It
(Anthony Powell, 1983—from Hamlet) or a story “Mortality and
Mercy in Vienna” (Thomas Pynchon, 1959—from Measure for
Measure) assumes, perhaps too charitably, that everyone will
recognize the Shakespearean provenance. And in a typical move,
Vladimir Nabokov coyly plundered one of Shakespeare’s least-read
plays, Timon of Athens, for the title Pale Fire
(1962) —perhaps to prove that he was more brushed-up than thou.

The list of writers who turned to Shakespeare for help reads
like a literary honor roll. It’s hard to know exactly what Charles
Dickens had in mind when he called his weekly journal Household
Words (published from 1980 to 1859), but the phrase seems to
originate in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth. Nonstop
Victorian novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady
Audley’s Secret, derived the title of her Taken at the
Flood (no date) from Cassius’s famous speech in Julius
Caesar (Agatha Christie caught the same wave in 1948);
Frederick Forsyth casts his log with Cassius’s nemesis Marc Antony
when he calls down The Dogs of War (1974). Davie Halberstam
quotes Antony’s fellow-in-arms and future nemesis Octavius with
The Noblest Roman (1961). Ogden Nash resorted to
Hamlet for The Primrose Path (1935), borrowing the
line from Ophelia. Echoing one of Prince Hamlet’s more famous
speeches, Archibald Macdonnell exclaims How Like an Angel
(1935), and Rex Stout replies How Like a God (1929).

Joyce Carol Oates imagines Marc Antony’s New Heaven, New
Earth (1974, from Antony and Cleopatra); she forgets
Godfrey W. Mathews’s reminder that there are More Things in
Heaven and Earth, Horatio (1934, from Hamlet). John
Steinbeck turned to Richard the Third for The Winter of
Our Discontent (1961); Dorothy Parker found Not So Deep as a
Well (1936) in Romeo and Juliet, the same play Ford
Madox Ford plumbed for It Was the Nightingale (1933). For
his collection of essays W. H. Auden looked to Shakespeare’s
pessimistic “Sonnet 111” for the title The Dyer’s
Hand (1962).

The majority of Bard-pillagers—including the fifteen authors I
found who called their books What’s in a Name? —welcome the
literary association. In other cases, I have some doubts. If
twenty-six writers, including at least six poets, proudly name
their offspring Full Circle, chances are that more than a
few are oblivious to the origin of the phrase in King Lear.
Of course, no one could have had originality chiefly in mind when
they hit upon Full Circle anyway. Sir Edward Elgar must have
been mulling over Othello when he composed “Pomp and
Circumstance” in 1901, or Elisabeth duchesse de Clermont-Tonnere
(1929)? Did they advert to the Moor’s tragedy, or Elgar’s
melody?

To Guard a Title that Was Rich Before

One glimpses an almost Darwinian pattern in the evolution of
some Shakespearean titles—the daring initial appropriation is
gradually, through the generations, domesticated as a distinct
species. Perhaps C. K. Scott Moncrieff should have seen this coming
when he took a line from “Sonnet 30” for his 1922
translation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu.
Remembrance of Things Past has cozily settled into its niche as
the instantly literary title for sentimental commemorative volumes
and nostalgic memoirs—by, for example, John Howard (1925), Sir
Henry Studdy Theobald (1935), and, in these more unsentimental
times, F. F. Bruce (1980). We shouldn’t forget to mention New
Zealand’s contribution to the genre, Remembrance of Things Past:
Solway College Golden Jubilee, 1966. A long ways from Marcel’s
alma mater. As with Huxley, the credit goes neither to Moncrieff
nor Shakespeare; but without that sonnet, we would be reading “In
Search of Lost Time” and Proust would no doubt be even less widely
read than he is now.

Every editorial page editor owes Shakespeare thanks for coining
“What’s past is prologue” (The Tempest) —“Past and
prologue,” for short. But so do institutions, who, if they could be
said to have a favorite line, go for this one and all the time. If
I were a corporation poised at a historic juncture, I’d use it too.
Mills College, in Oakland, California, seems to be the pioneer
here, having published in 1951 its self-celebrating “What’s Past
Is Prologue”: 1852-1952, a Century of Education. The quotation
marks around the borrowing indicate a level of self-awareness and
candor that was to disappear as quickly from the species as it
evolved. When the American Association of Social Workers published
its tome What’s Past Is Prologue in 1955, the phrase had
ceased to be a direct quotation and had become instead a kind of
institutionalized formula. The American Civil Liberties Union
briefly reverted back to quotation with its Constitutional
Liberty: “The Past Is Prologue” (1958), but the use of
quotation marks around a misquotation perhaps served as a negative
example for posterity. Thus the unregenerate misquotation of The
Past Is Prologue…Human Welfare in the Next Half Century (1964),
a report sponsored by the American Federation for the Blind. Doyce
B. Nunis, Jr., adopts the phrase to lend a cultured air to his
Past Is Prologue: A Centennial Portrait of Pacific Mutual Life
Insurance Company (1968), and he’s joined by Wilfred A. Clarke
in his History of the Bank of Mexico: The Past Is Prologue
(1972). The centennial/semicentennial theme has by this point
become inevitable, and the U.S. Highway Research Board follows suit
in Past and Prologue: The First Fifty Years (1972), a title
illustrating the final mutation of the phrase into the form we know
from today’s editorial pages.

Some Are Born Great, Some Achieve Greatness, and Some Have
Greatness Thrust upon Them

Shakespeare is prime hunting ground for memoirists, who perhaps
hope to register their names in the same immortal rolls as Hamlet
and Macbeth. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., looks back on The Salad
Days (1988, from Antony and Cleopatra), as does
Francoise Sagan (1984, English title). “One man in his time” (As
You Like It) is particularly popular among biographers and
autobiographers, who include Maud Skinner (1938), Nikolai Borodin
(1955), Serge Oblensky (1958), Phyllis Lean (1964), Alick West
(1985), Marjorie Bishop (1979), and G. B. Harrison (1985). And if
you’re writing a flattering portrait of a monarch, what title could
be more convenient then Every Inch a King, borrowed from
King Lear? Princess Pilar of Bavaria and Major Desmond
Chapman-Huston teamed up in 1932 to bestow this epithet upon King
Alfonso XIII of Spain. Sergio Correa da Costa (or rather, his
translator) was unembarrassed to apply the same title to his 1950
biography of the equally incomparable Dom Pedro I, first emperor of
Brazil. King Hussein of Jordan shunned this company, opting instead
to title his English-language reflections Uneasy Lies the
Head (1962), perhaps thinking the weary Henry IV a more apt
model than the insane Lear.

Whoever Herbert Chauncey was, we know from the biography by Sir
Arthur Hallam Elton (Baronet) that he was Herbert Chauncey: A
Man More Sinned Against than Sinning (1860, from King
Lear). Roy Struben reports that an obscure relative was
Taken at the Flood (1968, from Julius Caesar), also
the title of another biography by John Gunther (1960). Sir John
Rothstein set forth his life under the title Summer’s Lease
(1965, from “Sonnet 18”). For his own memoirs, Vincent
Massey resorted to the by-then-familiar What’s Past is
Prologue (1963).

Critics and biographers who specialize in Tortured Artist
figures instinctively turn to Hamlet, and home in on
Polonius’s assessment of the prince’s ranting: “Though this be
madness, yet there is method in’t” (Act 2, scene1). It turns out
that almost exactly the same could be applied to numerous
latter-day literary figures—witness Harvey Eagleson’s “Gertrude
Stein” Method in Madness” (1936), Edward Butscher’s Silvia
Plath, Method and Madness (1976), Roger S. Platizky’s A
Blueprint of His Dissent: Madness and Method in Tennyson’s
Poetry (1989), and, with an interesting twist, Carol Becker’s
Edgar Allan Poe: The Madness of the Method (1975).

But writers aren’t the only ones beset by schizoid tendencies;
it’s only just that, since Shakespeare was an actor and producer as
well as a dramatic poet, actors and producers should get to share
in Hamlet’s condition. Dick Atkins first ventured this observation
in Method to the Madness: Hollywood Explained (1975), and he
was echoed by Maurice Yacowar, in Method in Madness: The Art of
Mel Brooks (1981). Foster Hirsch shuns Hollywood to give “real”
actors their due in A Method to their Madness: A History of the
Actors Studio (1984). Those crazy artists!

Thankfully, not all creative minds are driven to despair. Other
authors rush in to assure us that some famous literary figures were
real family men and women. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, for example,
made for A Marriage of True Minds, or so we are told by
George Spater and Ian Parsons (1977, from “Sonnet 116”). N.
Brysson Morrison presents True Minds: The Marriage of Thomas and
Jane Carlyle (1974).

One Title in Its Time Plays Many Parts

Leaving the fertile field of literary madness, method, and
marriage to others, some authors prefer to follow in Shakespeare’s
dramaturgical footsteps, and they want us to know with whom they
associate themselves. In this genre falls the earliest instance of
a Shakespearean title I could find: playwright Isaac Jackman’s
All the World’s a Stage (1777, from As You Like It).
Another eighteenth century testament to the Bard’s long shadow is
Frederick Reynolds’s play Fortune’s Fool (1796, from
Romeo and Juliet). A certain Benjamin Webster staged his
One Touch of Nature (from Troilus and Cressida)
sometimes in the nineteenth century, and George Brookes’s own
All the World’s a Stage may also date from this era. We may
more precisely place Thomas J. Williams’s play Cruel to be
Kind (1850, from Hamlet).

(Hamlet’s dubious apology to his mother was picked up 128 years
later by pop tunesmith Nick Lowe, whose “Cruel to be Kind” turned
up as the flip-side of the single “Little Hitler.” Another
late-seventies rock act, Blondie, also plumbed Shakespeare for the
punning title of their recent greatest-hits package, Once More
into the Bleach [1989] —from Henry V’s “Once more unto the
breach.”)

Upton Sinclair wrote a little-known play called A Giant’s
Strength (from Measure for Measure) in 1948; that same
year, Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements staged Strange
Bedfellows (from The Tempest), just as the original
version of Kiss Me Kate was being written. The fifties seem
to have been a dead time for Shakespeare-inspired play titles, but
there was a revival of the fad in the 1960’s which saw the
production of the musical Salad Days by Julian Slade and
Dorothy Reynolds (1961, from Antony and Cleopatra), Louis
D’Alton’s Lovers’ Meeting (1963, from Twelfth Night),
and, most famous of all, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead (1967, from Hamlet).

Time’s Thievish Progress to Eternity

Writers looking for that inspiring touch of the grandiose and
the ominous often bestir themselves no further than the nearest
Shakespeare tragedy. Duncan Williams didn’t have to look far for
his To Be or Not to Be: A Question of Survival (1974).
Marcia Millman needed a bloodier image for her The Unkindest
Cut: Life in the Backrooms of Medicine (1978, from Julius
Caesar). ABC television sent chills up and down our spines with
their Macbeth-inspired expose, “Asbestos: The Way to Dusty
Death” (The Wide World of Learning, 1978). H. C. Witwer, on
the other hand, cleverly reworks Othello’s last words while
rescuing a cool-headed heroine from the jaws of terror in Love
and Learn: The Story of a Telephone Girl Who Loved Not Too Well,
but Wisely (1924).

Perhaps most theftworthy of all is Macbeth’s great speech from
Act 5, scene 5 [see TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW]. William
Faulkner quotes this bleak little passage with the title of his
well-known 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury. Though he was
actually beaten to the punch by James Henle, who published Sound
and Fury in 1924, Faulkner infused new vigor into the
dismemberment of Macbeth’s speech. Sound and Fury itself
continued to be popular—Jackson Wright (1938), Francis Chase, Jr.
(1942), Maurice Gorham (1948), and Warner Troyer (1980) all used
some version of the phrase. The line continues to nobly serve as
the title of Esquire magazine’s monthly
letters-to-the-editor column.

From other lines in the same speech, we have numerous versions
of Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and two books (including one by
the unstoppable Huxley) which go the whole way: Tomorrow and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow. This Petty Pace was wittily
appropriated by the artist Mary Petty for her 1945 collection of
drawings. Like Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the title All Our
Yesterdays seems to be popular in science fiction circles,
probably because of the Star Trek episode of that title.
Jean Lissette Aroeste in fact adapted the popular teledrama as
All Our Yesterdays: A Star Trek Fotonovel in 1978; John Peel
caught on to the nostalgia in 1985 with his All Our Yesterdays;
The Star Trek Files. Frank and Arthur Woodford lodge an entry
with what may or may not be a work of science fiction, All Our
Yesterdays: A Brief History of Detroit (1969).

Alastair MacLean plumbed Macbeth’s speech for The Way to
Dusty Death (1973), though his novel has nothing to do with
asbestos. We’ve found two other authors besides Huxley who lighted
on Brief Candles; three have availed themselves of the
proximate Walking Shadows. Rose Macaulay wrote a tale, but
not Told by an Idiot, in 1923. Malcolm Evans published
Signifying Nothing in 1986 and was echoed a year later by
Brian Rotman with Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of
Zero.

Besides All Our Yesterdays and Tomorrow and
Tomorrow, a few other lines have lent themselves to science
fiction. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes
(1962, also from Macbeth) may be the most famous, but Philip
Dick’s Time out of Joint (1959, from Hamlet), and by
Zdenek Jan Vaclavik’s gripping The Method in the Madness: A
Unitary Neuro-Physiological Theory of Neurosis and Psychosis
(1961). Scholars of a popular pseudoscience edited a collection
with the interest-piquing title Economics: Myth, Method, or
Madness? (1971), if just to show that artists and
neuro-physiologists have no corner on that market.

How Every Fool Can Play upon the Word

Every field, it seems, has its literary-minded advocates and
detractors. Etiquette is no exception, as someone known only as
“the Lounger in Society” manifested by publishing a guide-book
called, naturally enough, The Glass of Fashion (1881, from
Hamlet). Two of Shakespeare’s most famous loungers have
inspired festive-sounding publications. W. S. Maugham visits Sir
Toby Belch in Twelfth Night for Cakes and Ale (1930).
The obscure Herman Fetzer takes on the guise of another gastronome
and writes Pippins and Cheese (1960, from The Merry Wives
of Windsor) under the pseudonym “Jake Falstaff.”

If you’re thinking of inviting Toby of Jake over for a dinner
party, you might want to have a few useful culinary guides on hand:
Greta Hilb’s For Goodness Sake! (1964, from Henry the
Eighth), Alice H. Regis’s Cakes and Ale: The Ultimate Food
Glossary (1988, from Twelfth Night), and The San Diego,
California, All Saints Church’s Sweets for the Sweet Tooth
(no date, from Hamlet).

If, on the other hand, you find yourself at a professional
establishment, you might want to investigate the sociology of
interactions between customers and the hired help, as analyzed in
William R. Scott’s The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of
Tipping in America (1916, from Julius Caesar).

As in the social realm, writers concerned with politics have
benefited from having Shakespeare’s plays at hand in a pinch. When
the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society published its
perhaps not intrinsically gripping ruminations on the state of
labor, it turned to Measure for Measure for the title A
Giant’s Strength: Some Thoughts on the Constitutional and Legal
Position of the trade Unions in England (1958). Gertrude Stein,
Mel Brooks, neuro-physiology, and economics have a companion in one
nation-state, as John Kane-Berman describes it in South Africa:
The Method in the Madness (1978). South Africa is not alone
among nations in being honored (or dishonored) by association with
the Bard; Mabel Segun adopts Marc Anthony’s deathless words for her
Friends, Nigerians, Countrymen (1977, from Julius
Caesar), and she is joined by Hampton Howard in his recent
Friends, Russians, Countrymen (1988).

Thou Com’st in Such a Questionable Shape

Speaking of Russia, Yuri Glazov poses a vexing question indeed
in his To Be or Not to Be in the Party: Communist Party
Membership in the USSR (also 1988). The same passage in
Hamlet left to the mind of the translator of Hans Christian
Anderson’s To Be or Not to Be? (translated 1857). To Be
or Not to Be a Jew ponders Milton Steinberg (1950), but much
more crucial is Claudia de Lys’s query To Be or Not to Be a
Virgin (1960) — that is the question.

Kill All the Lawyers? asks Sloan Bashinsky in a study
subtitled A Client’s Guide to Hiring, Firing Using and Suing
Lawyers (1986) from Henry the Sixth, Part 2). The
subtitle already answers the question, and the formula is repeated
by Peter Bragdon. “What’s in a Name?” he inquires in the December
19, 1987 issue of Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report;
“For Consultants, Much Cash” (from Romeo and Juliet). Less
easily solved is James R. Carroll’s poser, “Wherefore Art Thou,
Jerry Brown?” (in California Journal, Nov. 1985) — for now,
at least, he is reportedly in charge of the California Democratic
party. The organization OMB Watch, which keeps its eye on the
federal Office of Management and Budget, doesn’t stop to ask
questions, but flatly declares FY 89 Budget: The Stuff Dreams
Are Made Of (1988, misquoting The Tempest).

All Thy Other Titles Thou Hast Given Away

If you happen to be keeping score, Aldous Huxley emerges from
this match the champ. The seven swipes I’ve been able to verify
include Mortal Coils (1922, from Hamlet), Brief
Candles (1930, from Macbeth), Brave New World
(1932, from The Tempest), Time Must Have a Stop
(1944, from Henry the Fourth, Part 1), Ape and
Essence (1948, from Measure for Measure), Tomorrow
and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1958, from Macbeth), and
Brave New World Revisited (also 1958). Left in the dust are
William Dean Howells (score: 4) and the only other serious
contender, the Nietzchean literary critic G. Wilson Knight (score:
5, further research pending). Though I continue to enumerate, log,
and list, these three are nevertheless safely dead: the field is
now wide open for any and all contenders. Pass the chips—the fun is
just beginning.

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